Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

by Kameron Hurley

  “It’s all right,” I explain to her, and my voice sounds far away, “She doesn’t like Women.”

  Gian spits at me again.

  When I wake again, the real waking, I wake to the little violet-gassed waif who first summoned me. She says I am needed on the line.

  “Verj?” I say.

  “The Neuter?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you really a queer?” she says.

  “Verj,” I say.

  She points across the med tent to a still, solitary figure in a low-slung hammock.

  I roll out of my hammock. My leg bleeds pain. I limp over to Verj. Taking her hand is like holding a rotting melon. The tissue beneath the skin is rotting away. Her face is unrecognizable. Blue-black, the flesh beginning to liquefy.

  “Verj,” I say.

  Her lips move, and then, “You liar.” But she is not angry.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and I want to squeeze her hand, but I know the flesh will spill open. She will dissolve before my eyes. I saved her just to watch her die.

  “It does not mean she did not love you,” Verj says.

  “What?”

  “Elan,” she says, and the name sounds strange coming from the lips of a Neuter, a thing Elan desired far more than she desired me. “You can love a person you do not desire,” Verj says, and she tries to laugh, maybe, but it turns into a liquid cough. Blood smears her chin. “What strange creatures you Women are, to think you must devour the body of one you love. Perhaps, the translation is wrong… love… you use the wrong words for everything, you Women…”

  “Nadav.” The waif is behind me. “The trench director,” she says.

  Verj has not opened her eyes. I let her hand go. Someone has taken off her suit and covered her in clean white.

  I walk out of the med tent and the med trench, and up to the front line. Gian is there. She has her arms folded, waiting. She is taller than me, and she frowns when she sees me.

  “Ready?” she says.

  “For what?” I say.

  Dawn is breaking across the sky.

  “You brought it. You should see it.” And she gestures to the women behind the big rotating guns. They pour resin into the barrels.

  “The CFR?” I say.

  She nods.

  “The pack was too heavy to be holding only those bursts,” I say.

  “Med rations,” Gian says.

  “Thornbug pinches,” I say. “Antibodies. You asked for them. You told them to bug the pack for a trench director.”

  Gian does not look at me. “Of course.”

  Gian spits kaj at her feet. “Can’t be too careful with queers, now, can I?”

  “No,” I say. “I suppose not.” I can still feel Verj’s hand in mine.

  Our filter winks out. The guns fire.

  I watch two neat spherical bursts shoot out over the long swath of red grass between our trenches and the Androgynies. The bursts are beautiful. They look transparent, like soap bubbles. But I know they are not colorless; they are full of color, painted in it, awash in it.

  I hear the bursts pop.

  And the world is filled with dragonflies.

  This is the way the world ends.

  Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand

  Finally, I wanted to end this collection with the original Nalah story I wrote back at Clarion. This one made the rounds at all the major (and a lot of minor) magazines, but was never loved. I still had a long way to go to figure out pacing and plot and tension (oh my). I never did figure out how to “fix” it in a way that would sell it. My first novel, God’s War, was inspired in large part by this portrait of a disillusioned warrior battling it out in the desert (Nalah even makes an appearance in the third book in my series). You’ll also see a lot of similiarities between this story and My Oracles at the End of the World. And, once again, plenty of woman-on-woman misogyny. Women vs. ladies happens all the time out here. Divide and conquer works.

  Nalah sent the boy out across the sand in search of Hanife’s rebels three days ago. They left her this of him.

  Nalah pulled out the blade sheathed across her chest. It was the dull blade she used for traitors and criminals, the blade she had carried with her since the beginning.

  She looked across the blistered body of the boy to where Tarik, her second, stood - his tall form outlined in the dusty red haze of the sky. His onyx-colored hair was braided back against his scalp, and his eyes were cold, intense, set close together in his narrow face.

  “Blade,” she said.

  He tossed her a sharp steel blade. She caught it by the hilt, turned back to the boy. The boy opened his mouth, gurgled words she pretended not to hear. The red sand would chew him apart come nightfall. To leave him as he was invited the sand to eat through the open wounds of his body.

  She took hold of the boy’s mop of black hair, brought the knife down cleanly across either side of the throat. Blood rushed out across her forearm.

  This was not the war she had agreed to fight.

  Nalah tossed the weapon at Tarik’s feet.

  “Bury him,” she said.

  Another offering to the insatiable sand.

  She turned on her heel and slipped back across the red sand to where her group of fighters squatted at the bottom of a dune a dozen yards distant, all eyes on her and the body. She walked past them and up to the crest of the dune, gazed south.

  Tarik met her later, licking the blood from his calloused hands. The desert would eat him if he left blood on his skin. Nalah stared down at her own bloody hand. The desert did not eat women.

  “We should press on to the hold,” Tarik said. “If the runner’s blistered like that, it means they marched on to the hold sometime after dawn.”

  “They don’t know where the hold is. They could still be wandering.”

  “You should have sent Shani,” he said. He didn’t look at her.

  “I thought of it.”

  “An emotional decision.” Tarik glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Should I wrap you in a red dress and call you lady?”

  “Save your questions for the city. There’s no place for them here.” The boy’s blood felt sticky on her hand. “We push on,” she said. “Send out a runner ahead to see if they’ve reached the hold.”

  “Another runt?”

  “Send Shani.”

  “Done.” He slid back down the dune.

  She gazed after Tarik, watched the red sand shift in his wake, and thought of dead boys in shallow graves.

  Nalah led the march, a force of just over fifty, across red dunes and loose pockets of red rock. Jagged pillars of gray stone thrust up from the hilly landscape, made deep shadows across the sand as dusk fell.

  Shani traveled back to them just after dark, running hard and fast under a big full moon and smaller half-moon of radiant scarlet.

  “They won’t be expecting us,” Shani said. Her bare blade was wet with blood, and Nalah watched her lick it clean. “I found their runner.”

  Nalah led them across the twilight sand. She crept to the edge of a sandy rise with Tarik. Her force outnumbered the one below by a full half, and the people that milled about the brightly lit tents below were robed for the city. King Hanife’s youngest boy had never lived out on the open sand. He knew nothing of thirst and blood and stealth.

  Nalah drew her sword and moved. Her fighters moved with her. They came silent as night into the camp, and in the flickering light of the fires, the rebels saw them too late.

  Dust and sand and dirt stung Nalah’s eyes. In the heat and darkness, she saw a dead boy in place of the one she faced, a dead boy clawing out at her from a shallow, sandy grave.

  She tread across a dead, cooling body, sandals pressing the choking form into the sand.

  Nalah heard something above the grunting, clanging fray - Tarik’s voice, rich and loud in the sobbing night.

  “I have him!” he cried. “I have him!”

  For Nalah, there was only her next opponent, only her swo
rd, only his staff and knife. A body fell beneath her. She twisted around to take note of the camp. Her fighters were finishing skirmishes at the edges, but most of the robed men had fallen. Sweat slathered her skin.

  She nodded at Shani, and Shani knew: the sand would finish the wounded. Loot the bodies before it swallows them.

  Shani leapt over a dying figure, her knife raised. She called for a handful of fighters, her voice exuberant.

  Nalah wondered if she had ever been as young as Shani.

  Tarik dragged a howling, sinewy male toward Nalah. The boy had smoke-gray eyes and a hawkish nose like his father. Tarik had stripped the clothing from him, or found him that way - Nalah never asked.

  Behind Tarik, two fighters, Heru and Akila, stood over a huddle of four thin ladies dressed in red, all no older than thirteen or fourteen. Their painted eyes and faces were garish in the flickering light of the strewn fires. They wore silver collars with the king’s seal stamped into the metal.

  “You’re Kesi,” Nalah said to the naked boy. He was young, younger than she remembered, sixteen or seventeen, no older than her own boy. She did not remember the last time she saw her own boy on the open sand.

  “Nalah, you know me,” Kesi said, struggling to his knees. “Eshe and I played together. Upon the desert wind, Nalah, we played together!”

  Those fighters Shani had not taken with her stood watching, their bodies merely shadows. Nalah felt their eyes. Somewhere, far-off, she heard the hiss of the sand. It smelled the blood. Nalah remembered the boy, the runner, the death-stink of his living body.

  “Let him up, Tarik,” she said.

  Tarik released his hold.

  The captive scrambled across the sand on his hands and knees, prostrated himself before her, and raised only his head.

  “Thank you,” he said, “Thank you.” She saw moisture in his eyes that threatened to spill down his dusty cheeks.

  Nalah pulled out her dull blade. She saw Tarik move to give her his instead, but she shook her head. The bone hilt felt good in her hand.

  Kesi understood. The water escaped from the corners of his smoky eyes, carving lazy tear trails down the sides of his face.

  This was not the war I agreed to fight.

  The sand howled.

  Nalah and her fighters arrived at King Hanife’s hold four days later. The hold lay at the edge of an oasis, a square of deep green grass and tall, three-tiered palm trees with serrated leaves. The city’s mud-brick watchtower had a view that stretched out across the hilly desert to the horizon, and when Nalah and her fighters came into their line of sight, the gates opened and a handful of white-robed king’s guards strode out across the sand to escort Nalah into the city.

  “Success?” one of the robed men asked Nalah.

  She nodded to Tarik. He pulled Kesi’s severed head from a leather satchel at his hip.

  The speaker, Gahiji, gave a curt nod. Gahiji was a silver-haired fighter with a desert-hewn face. He and Hanife were brothers.

  Gahiji escorted her and her fighters back toward the hold through a maze of mud-brick shops and private residences enclosed in an immense defensive wall, thirty feet high. Nalah remembered scaling those walls a decade ago. Hanife had added another ten feet to them.

  The press of noise and bodies created their own heat and stir in the walled city. Nalah heard the chatter of public ladies from the balconies that stretched out over the streets, and the loud calls of the men in the market stalls, their tattooed faces soaked in sweat and sun. Small boys ran alongside her column of fighters. They had their hair braided back like fighters, and the bolder ones picked up handfuls of sand and threw it at the collared ladies. The less bold boys clutched at one another and giggled.

  Nalah got her fighters settled in the garrison. Gahiji called up her and Tarik into the heart of the hold, to Hanife’s keep.

  As they wound through the low, cool mud-brick halls of the keep, robed men moved past them. Their gazes were long and open, displaying the usual curiosity of city men. City men did not often see real women inside the walls. Women were the stuff of blood and sand. Men didn’t need women inside the walls: the walls kept out the sand.

  “Hanife asks to see you tonight,” Gahiji said.

  “My son?” Nalah asked at the door of her room.

  “In the training yard. You’ll be assigned servants. I have other duties.”

  He inclined his head and left them. Gahiji had never much cared for Nalah.

  Nalah nodded to Tarik before he could enter his room. “Bring the head to Hanife’s second.”

  “You don’t want to do it?”

  “Not today.”

  “This wasn’t the sort of battle we said we’d fight,” Tarik said.

  She looked back at him, heard the thoughts she could not speak. Ah, Tarik - my conscious, my reason, my second. We have spent too long together.

  “We’re fighting rebels who disagree with Hanife’s vision,” she said. “We’ve done that since the beginning.”

  “I never agreed to slaughter children.”

  “Nor did I. The battle changed, that’s all.”

  Nalah wiped her left hand on her tunic, noted the brown bloodstains beneath her fingernails. She needed a good steam bath and scraping.

  Tarik gritted his teeth and pushed through the heavy curtain into his room.

  Nalah walked down to the steam room. She scraped the dirt and the last of the dried blood from her skin. Blood and grit stayed locked under her nails. Her body ached.

  She walked back to her room just in time to meet her servant, a thin, dusty-skinned boy with liquid dark eyes and shaggy black hair covering his ears. She asked for food and clothes. She dressed in clean brown leggings and a short brown tunic. He cleaned her sandals.

  She slept fitfully on one of the rug-covered mud-brick benches in the room. She awoke to the boy shaking her, dark eyes rolled back in his head, fingers bony thin, his face emaciated, and the smell... No. She rubbed at her face. The vision passed. Her servant gazed down at her, dipped his head.

  “Your son-”

  “Leave us alone.” Her son’s voice carried from the doorway.

  The servant ducked his head again and slipped out into the hall.

  Nalah sat up, swung her feet to the dusty floor. Her boy stood in the doorway.

  Her boy.

  His short, sinewy body was clothed in a too-short gray robe with a green belt. He wore a length of steel at his hip, a sharp sword that had yet to be blooded and dulled. The features of his face were hers; the snub nose, dark, deep set eyes and high brow, but the height and form were his father’s, the ghostly remnants of a dead man eaten by the sand. Here in the city, her boy’s hair had grown long and wild and hung into his face.

  Nalah felt a knot of worry ease in her body, the twisting fear that rode with her every time she left him, the fear that when she returned, she would return to a dead boy.

  “You’ve been well?” she asked.

  “He sent you to murder Kesi.”

  “He sends me to murder a lot of people,” she said.

  “It’s true then.”

  She wanted to tell him: Yes, boy, I slaughtered your crib mate. Yes, boy, I slaughtered a baby. Yes, boy, but you know all this as you know hunger, as you know fear, as you know sand, as you know me.

  “You’ve seen me fight,” she said. “You understand it.”

  But he had only seen her fight in closed circles inside city walls. He had not seen her on the sand. “I wish it were different,” she said.

  “No you don’t,” he said. “Look at you, sleeping here in your clean clothes, with good food and a servant who bows his head to you.

  And where’s Kesi? His head’s in Tarik’s bag and you’re here, giving your loyalty to a fat city king.”

  Nalah gazed down at her son’s feet. He wore new sandals. His feet were soft. No calluses. Her gaze went back to his clean face.

  “You have not killed a man,” she said.

  He puffed up his thin chest, gri
pped the hilt of his sword with his right hand. “Kesi was going to change everything.”

  Nalah stood, and saw him take a step back as she did. She was a woman, and she stood like one, a stance she had perfected in her two decades of fighting.

  “Don’t ever say that boy’s name again,” she said. “Ever. Hear that, boy?”

  “Why?” Eshe screwed up his face into a semblance of courage. “Why should I be quiet? Hanife’s government has flaws. Kesi and I had solutions, and Hanife had him killed for it. Kesi-”

  She had left him here too long, left him here with city men and frail ladies and court politics.

  “Kesi wanted to fuck his father’s ladies and take over his father’s holds,” she said.

  “Hanife’s vision was always one of keeping peace. I remember it. I saw it. You see nothing. You’re just a boy.”

  The wrong words. She knew they were wrong as soon as she said them.

  “You’re just a woman,” Eshe blurted. “You should have been brought up a lady. You’re turning into one.” He pushed back the heavy curtain and fled from the room.

  Nalah fell back down onto the bench. She looked at the fruit platter at the center of the room, realized she was not hungry.

  My boy… My boy… what about my boy?

  She curled back up onto the bench. Closed her eyes.

  Dreamed of dead boys in the sand.

  Nalah’s servant woke her for the banquet, but she did not follow after him. In the room next to hers, she heard Tarik and a couple of ladies in the throes of something other than battle.

  She stood and walked out to find her servant. She asked him to summon Shani from the garrison. He padded off down the hall.

  Before she could turn back into her room, she saw Gahiji coming down the hall toward her, wearing a stern frown on his dark face. “You were summoned to the banquet,” he said.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “Hanife wants to see you. Now.”

  Gahiji led her to the throne room, a wide rectangular room covered in colorful throw rugs. The air stank of sweat and dust and heavy pomade. A dozen merchants and councilors and tax agents - dressed in red and green and too-bright yellow - milled about, holding rolled parchments and waving their fleshy hands to emphasize their flowery words. They turned at the motion from the doors and stared.